| Garden of the Heart |
Chapter 7 |
Page 5 |
There are visions of human need which inspire love in men’s hearts and send them out to do Christ’s work in marvelous ways. The vision of a lost race brought Christ to this world and His compassion for sinning and perishing men led Him to His cross. A vision of heathen lands in their darkness and sin leads earnest souls to volunteer for foreign mission work. Pity for needy ones in the great cities has led noble men and women to give their lives to the work of rescuing the fallen and the outcast.
The story of Dr. Barnardo, the friend of waifs and strays, is a story of obedience to a heavenly vision. One bitter winter’s night one of the boys Dr. Barnardo had been teaching asked leave to remain all night in the stable where the little school was held. “Oh, no! Run away home,” said the doctor. “Got no home,” said the boy. “Be off,” said the teacher sharply; “go to your mother.” The boy said he had no mother, had no father, didn’t live anywhere, and had no friends. Dr. Barnardo talked with him further, and learned that he was only one of many waifs who literally had no home, no father, no mother, and no friends, lived nowhere. The boy led him out – it was midnight – and showed him where a number of these boys stayed. Peeping into barrels, boxes, and holes, and striking matches, he found at last a woebegone group of eleven poor boys, from nine to eighteen years old, sleeping in all postures, clad in their rags, with nothing to cover them, exposed to the bitter wind – a spectacle to angels and men, sorrowful enough to break any heart of love.
“Shall I wake ‘em up?” asked Jim Jarvis, the boy guide who had brought Dr. Barnardo to this scene of want. “Shall I show you another lay, sir? There’s lots more.” But the young student had seen enough. Sick at heart, he went home, saddened, amazed, and bewildered, but the vision of misery and wretchedness he had seen led to his devoting his life to the saving of waifs and strays. During the forty years that he lived, giving himself wholly to this one work, he rescued more than fifty thousand children from the gutter, fed them, trained them, and set most of them at least, in honest ways of life. He organized a great rescue work which is going on, now that he is gone. All this because he was not disobedient to the vision which broke upon his eyes that cold midnight.
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